With this fourth studio album of the Australian band Dead can dance, released in 1988, singer Lisa Gerrard decided to vocally experiment. Some years earlier, Peter Murphy of the band Bauhaus gave her a tape of the Bulgarian choir Le mystère des voix Bulgares. Its a choir that I remember also very well, for its otherworldly sound and strange (for me) harmonics. She copied that sound into many of the songs on this album, like the opener Host of Seraphim.
The cover art for the album refers to band member Brendan Perry’s idea: In a lot of aerial photographs of the Earth, if you look upon it as a giant organism—a macrocosmos—you can see that the nature of the life force, water, travels in a serpentine way.